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“... was Joyce’s speciality, however. Whatever he wrote was quite sure of its reception, like a king in disguise: the details of his own life had the same mesmeric authority for early readers as the scraps from books read by Eliot have for readers of The Waste Land. Some of this confidence he was able to impart to his new friend Schmitz, particularly in ...”

“... it possess that deep inward dottiness which gives an imaginative persona to The Lord of the Rings, King Solomon’s Mines, The Hound of the Baskervilles. At the same time, it is supremely chic. Its deftness and scholarly style go with great good humour, more like Ariosto’s than Voltaire’s; and while its deadpan exposition of historic cults and mysteries is ...”

“... weigh relatively lightly with promotion committees. The critic, not the editor or packager, is king. Publishers such as Ashgate (and to a lesser extent Palgrave Macmillan) use the tactic of pushing out a lot of monographs, none of which will sell a lot, but which will bring in a good return en masse. They have a fruitfly lifespan; if the publisher gets it ...”

“... separable. Writers – Sir Thomas More, Sir Walter Ralegh, Samuel Daniel, Ben Jonson, Thomas May, John Milton, Andrew Marvell and many more – moved between history and poetry or drama, finding in them complementary means of instilling virtue and wisdom and influencing events. History, which was seen as a branch not only of scholarship but of rhetoric and of ...”

“... largest number of people today know by heart? The best known Victorian poem is probably ‘Good King Wenceslas’ (by J.M. Neale), followed by ‘Once in royal David’s city’ (Mrs Alexander); ‘All things bright and beautiful’ (also Mrs Alexander) is less familiar than it used to be, but was once possibly the best known of all. The most famous ...”

“... him closely; I gazed at him with astonishment, like a casket in which there were millions and a king’s diamonds, reflecting on all that had come from this man now sitting beside me on a small chair, and fixing my eyes on the right hand that has written so many beautiful things. Yet here was the man who has most set my heart beating since I was born, and ...”

“... were culled from the Bookseller). The current situation in the hit parade is this: were it not for John Grisham, whose A Painted House was leading Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers by 7201 ‘units’ – which presumably means ‘books’ – to 1964 for the week ending 24 February 2001, the end of February would be one of the less impressive times of ...”

“... to whom his parents surrendered Bruce’s care for the first six years of his life. ‘I was lord, king and the messiah all rolled into one,’ he writes, about being the replacement child for his morbidly depressed grandmother’s long-dead daughter, Virginia, killed at the age of five by a truck while riding her tricycle past the corner gas station. He ...”

“... of change Perplexes monarchs. According to Milton’s early biographer, the Irish republican John Toland, Charles II’s Licenser for the Press regarded these lines as subversive, and wanted to suppress the whole poem. Immediately after the passage in which he imagines God hatching the universe out of the abyss, Milton asks: what in me is dark ...”

“... smelling powerfully of brandy. Seeing I was a bit dejected, Bruce said he would plug me with John Major and David (Young) ... I went to Brooks’s, lost £150 and my appetite waned. Returned here and ate a toasted bun, first food since a banana at 1.30. In the tea room I had a chat with Fallon, a nice cool whip. I complained about all this ...”

“... or was it, as the writer Hilton Als put it, ‘a high-faggot style’, or did it originate, as John Edgar Wideman claimed, from a mixture of the King James Bible and African American speech? Was it full of the clarity, eloquence and intelligence that Chinua Achebe suggested? And was Baldwin’s involvement with the Civil ...”

“... from the four walls. Historians and biographers have never offered identical portraits of the king. For A.F. Pollard, writing a hundred years ago, Henry was a Land of Hope and Glory monarch, who by some divine intuition foresaw his country’s destiny and laid its foundations. ‘It was the king, and the ...”

“... the one hand, he was a kind of comedian, a learned buffoon, a butt for courtly wits and poets like John Donne and Ben Jonson, who both knew him well. On the other hand, he was the immensely tough and courageous traveller, whose remarkable journeys through Europe and Asia were made almost entirely on foot. This is the boast entailed in his favourite description ...”

“... the 1790s (which included a letter from Elizabeth I thanking him for his ‘prettye Verses’) and John Payne Collier in the 1830s and 1840s (which showed Shakespeare to have been a well-connected member of metropolitan literary circles from an early stage). But for Shapiro the real villain is Edmond Malone. The usual story is that Malone, as he himself ...”

“... at the top of the Bay of Bengal. Those tangled mangrove swamps of Sundarbans, paradise for herons, king cobras, honey-gatherers, fishermen, will no longer protect. The hundred mouths of Ganges, plus sea rising to meet the melt from Himalaya, will finally swallow that land. All those wars, India, Pakistan, the intricate woeful mud pie of human history, will no ...”